


Time Does Not Bring Relief

by oddegg



Category: Primeval
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-10
Updated: 2009-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-04 08:12:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oddegg/pseuds/oddegg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes monsters come green-eyed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Does Not Bring Relief

Nick Cutter is a quiet man. Mild, quiet and contained in the way that adults who were unbearably shy children often are. He is compassionate about his animals and his team. Even his ex-wife.

He is _nice_ – and almost everyone he meets likes him in the end.

 

Ryan thinks about killing him a lot.

 

Thinks about it when he watches Cutter butt heads with Lester, or explain things in his soft Scottish accent in that o-so-patient way to Ryan and his team.

Imagines it when they’re all out in the woods, tracking down some new-but-old freak of nature. Thinks how easy it would be to plunge a knife into the back of his neck and drop him down quiet behind the trees.

 

But he thinks about it most of all when Cutter’s talking to Stephen. Murmuring to him, standing close, touching his _fucking_ arm. Then, the thoughts get so vivid and pound so much in his head that he has to turn away, look away and sometimes check shaking hands for the blood he wants so much to put there.

 

Like now – when he’s kneeling down by the body of some poor bastard who was in the wrong wood at the wrong time when a Gorgonopsid was trolling for dinner. A poor bastard who’s spine finally gave up the ghost and dropped his upper torso from the tree right at Cutters feet.

It’s a fairly fresh kill, and when Ryan looks across to the other side of the clearing there’s still faint traces of steam rising up into the cold, winter air from the slightly warm entrails.

 

He sees Cutter leaning against a tree, retching horribly – and he sees Stephen soothing his back, running worried hands over the Professors hair and he clenches his jaw till it creaks and has to look away.

He looks back down at the corpse, its pale blue eyes staring sightless up at the stars, and notices that only one small clot of blood mars the mans hair. Thick, sandy blond hair. Just like Cutter’s, he thinks.

He has to stop himself from smiling.

 

***

 

Many people think Ryan’s cold. The ultimate, emotionless professional. Even the other men in the army units he’s been in had thought that. When he was leading his team to the Pole, he’d overheard one of them mutter to his buddy about the trackless, sub-zero landscape being ‘the perfect setting for that cold-eyed, scary bastard’.

 

But they don’t understand that the blankness is a mask. That what it’s covering is rage, hate, envy. All the dark, sinister feelings that people don’t like to think about.

 

He’d been read a poem once by some dead American about the end of the world being in fire or ice, and that desire was hot and hate was cold and he’d thought, yeh, the guy knows what he’d talking about but he doesn’t take it to the next level.

Because what Ryan usually felt was a mix of the two – cold hate mixed up with a twisted lust that burned you and wanted to see blood. And that the icy rage mixed with the hot red until your nerves couldn’t tell the difference in temperature – until the cold burned you like dry ice on your flesh, like sticking your hand in liquid nitrogen. And the one thing you can think of to soothe the burn is making someone else feel the pain they’ve dealt you. Seeing hurt in deep blue eyes, bruises on that taunting skin.

Carve your name in them, so you’ll be in their blood like they’re in yours.

 

**

 

He never examines his feelings that much – has the suspicion of touchy-feely stuff that a lot of army guys do, but there’s the occasional flash when he knows this isn’t about Stephen, that it’s about history, where this whole thing started.

It’s about Belfast. And Liam.

 

Belfast had been good training for the rest of his career. Still just a raw recruit at 18, he had learned how to cope with knowing he could be hit by a stone at any moment, or a bullet, or a bomb.

He’d seen the folly of pitting the usual military capture techniques against guys who’d grown up locally. The whole neighbourhood had been there playground, for Christ’s sake; and trying to chase those involved in incidents was like playing some high stakes, adult version of knock door run and hide go seek combined. They’d be in one door, out the back and over the fence to the next house while the owners of the first lied to your face and shouted at you. Good training for Iraq.

 

And he’d seen the Irish boys. Or boy – Liam. All lazy smiles and craic. Dark hair and bright eyes that undressed you from your uniform with one flicker. He’d had Ryan up against a wall in an alley with his tongue down his throat half an hour after meeting him in the pub. He’d been beautiful and hot and funny – and he’d broken Ryan’s heart.

He’d been a coward. An understandable one, but a coward. Gay from a religion and a country that didn’t tolerate it, catholic in a Proddy area, grown up in an IRA stronghold and fucking a British squaddie. Perfectly happy to drop to his knees and stick his sharp tongue up Tom’s arse in the bedsit he rented, but incapable of looking him in eye outside.

 

He’d dropped Tom like a hot coal after someone had made a crack about collaborators in a pub, and he’d been with some other guy within the week. Tom had had 5 miserable weeks around Antrim before his application to the SAS had been approved and he’d been transferred to basic training. It had been the last time he ever cried, the first time for years. And it had been the last time Ryan let anyone else call the shots, ever.

 

**

 

He’d not been the most stable guy before the army, he knew that. Dad and then intermittent foster care had seen to that – teen years spent running riot with guys who were either dead or in gaol now. And then near 20 years of being taught to view humans as a collection of risks and targets. Head shot, body shot. Knee, groin, solar plexus, neck. Weak spots. It slowly bled the humanity out of you, because you weren’t meant to think of people in that way, weren’t meant to be able to conduct an ‘interrogation’ and feel nothing but mild disgust at the mess you were making of your shoes. He tried not to be around children after the day he realised his first thought on seeing someone that young, that vulnerable was

“I could snap your neck one-handed”.

 

He was known for flat statements rather than wit, because other people didn’t understand his humour. In the Gulf the first time, he’d taken point on a hit and had made a joke. “Wet work in the desert” he’d said.

No-one else had laughed.

 

But Stephen had got him. Laconic himself, he had got the deadpan thing. And he was a hunter himself, a tracker – Ryan thought he would have partly understood seeing people as prey.

 

If Ryan hadn’t made him feel like that himself.

 

**

 

He’d wanted him the moment he saw him. Hunting together what he’d assumed would turn out to be a hoax.

 

And he’d found out, not long after. After hunting through tunnels underground and seeing that Stephen noticed Ryan noticing him, he had waited for him at his flat and when he knocked on the door after Hart had been let out of hospital he hadn’t even had to say anything. The other man had answered the door to his knock, taken one long look at him and pulled him inside.

It had been violent – all bruising mouths and teeth, grabbing hands, and it had been near silent apart from panting breaths and moans.

It had been perfect.

 

They’d had a handful of other encounters; all the same. Rough, dirty fucks in snatched moments. Jagged couplings in the woods – dry poundings against trees and hasty sucking-off’s after chases, high on adrenaline like in those white-clear moments during operations when you know you’re alive and the other bastard isn’t.

 

And then Ryan had noticed how Stephen looked at Cutter.

 

How many quick glances he shot him, especially when the woman Helen was mentioned. How solicitous he was towards him. And he knew there was only one explanation.

Stephen wanted Cutter.

 

The knowledge came to him and smouldered. Blazing up with every other tiny look he caught, every touch he intercepted.

And Stephen started to twitch and look away under Ryan’s stare, until all he could see behind his lids when he closed his eyes was treacherous blue eyes looking back at him.

 

**

 

He’d scared Stephen, he knew that. Their last encounter. The other man had been so up-beat about the bloody dodo’s – even after what happened to the student, parasite carrying little sods that they were, and Ryan had gone with Stephen back to his flat.

 

It had been their first time in Stephen’s actual bedroom, Ryan realised afterwards. Their first time in an actual bed.

 

And it had been good. Intense. Silent, just like the other times – a quiet place, but calmer, warmer, with soft, more yielding sounds as he sucked and nipped his way across the map of Stephen’s body. There had been lubricant for a change, and when Ryan finally slid inside him the other man had arched up underneath him almost like a real lover.

 

But as Ryan moved in and out of him, Stephen’s face had begun to flicker – move like some other, past features were guttering there as well. And Ryan had seen with perfect clarity the picture of Stephen’s hand on Cutter’s shoulder that day – and his hands had gone to Stephen’s throat.

 

Hart hadn’t grasped what was happening at first, until Ryan’s fingers had tightened and he’d begun to loose his breath. He’d tried to speak, then brought his own hands up and clawed, then begun to thrash as survival instinct kicked it – trying to throw the other man off.

But Ryan was bigger, and stronger, and very highly trained and he didn’t falter as Stephen pushed at his arms, his face. His rhythm didn’t change as he pounded into the man underneath him, except to increase his pace as his grip closed – and his breathing barely sped up until with a final floundering of both their bodies he came deep and hard and fell down on top of the now limp body below him – sticky fluids fusing their stomachs together.

 

When Stephen had come to properly, Ryan was already dressed – sitting in a chair across from the bed, watching him. Stephen had automatically shrunken away.

 

They’d just looked at each other for a long, long moment – Stephen pale and frightened, wide eyed, Ryan in shadow, examining his work – his finger marks on the other’s neck.

Then Ryan had left.

 

**

 

Stephen hadn’t spoken to him since, hadn’t looked at him. But he thought about that night as he stroked himself now, lying on his hotel bed in Cheltenham, ready to investigate the Forest tomorrow.

Cutter had actually smiled at him on the golf-course, after the fucker had pushed him and spoiled his aim. And Ryan knew the trusting idiot thought his own smile back was a truce – meant that Ryan had started to appreciate these animals as well, see their worth. But he’d been imaging his knife in the man’s gut at that moment, imagined watching Stephen while he eviscerated his boyfriend, and he’d finally decided that he was going to act. That was why he’d smiled.

 

Nick Cutter was living on borrowed time. 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is for fredbassett, who lured me to the Primeval sandbox in the first place.
> 
> A/N: So I realise that my Ryan is a perhaps a little more, umm – psycho than usual, and that writing this fic's a bit like borrowing your friends Barbie's and giving 'em back after you've punked them out as BDSM, edgeplay dominatrixes. Sorry, I usually play nicer with other people's toys than this!
> 
> This was obliquely inspired by telperion_15's Time Heals All Wounds. I read the title and this poem (http://www.bartleby.com/131/19.html) popped into my head, and it seemed to be being read by a very angry and Dark!Ryan. It doesn't really relate to the fic that much but it sparked it off and the rest flowed pretty quickly from that.  
> The idea is also underpinned by a play I saw which raises issues of what being in special op's does to a person, and from a book called The Intimate History of Killing.   
> I'm sure there are plenty of normal, psychologically healthy current and ex SAS members out there, and I in no way want to disparage the unit (especially since they can, you know, kill me), but seeing and doing the kinds of things they do has to affect you and I think my Ryan may have gazed into that particular abyss too long.
> 
> I think he's just stressed and needs to relax: I'll give him something nice to play with in my next one – possibly Connor : )
> 
> A/N 2 – the 'dead American' Ryan mentions is Robert Frost. The poem is Fire and Ice.  
> 'Black Irish' isn't a description of skin tone, but a physiological type you find in Ireland along with the pale red head. James Murray is an example of the type; others are Gabriel Byrne and Daniel Day Lewis


End file.
